~BBW, ~~WG, Theological SF/F When a slow apocalypse of starvation threatens to wipe humanity from the face of the earth, it turns out that our only hope might be a girl with room to grow and a man of wealth and taste.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?' And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.' But the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
Genesis 3:1-6a
And he said to them, Let no man exceed what is granted him for sustenance, and let no feasts and revelry exist in your land; for man does not live by bread, but by the word of God.
Bartholomew 12:7
Son, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.
David Wong, John Dies at the End
From Narrative of Felicity Camden; Being the Tale of a Girl Who Accompanied the Devil to Other Realms, Dallied with the Heresies of Abundance, and Returned with Not an Inconsiderable Amount of Self-Knowledge
I, Felicity Camden, daughter of the Church of He Who Walks Between the Rows, was met by Old Scratch, Goodman-Brown-like, on the evening of my eighteenth birthday, and snatched up quick as you please before I'd time for so much as a single prayer for deliverance.
I knew who he was without one bit of puzzlement, the instant I laid eyes on him. A queer matter-o'-fact sensation it was, without the sort of shiver up your spine most folk would expect from such a diabolical rendezvous. I turned my head, and my gaze slid across him like a finger through oil, and the thought popped into my head, Oh, it's the devil, walking by just there, with his shiny self all smart and polished. It was the shine more than anything that led me to knowing, right there and then; for what emissary of the godhead would flaunt themselves in so shameless a manner, and what human would find the water to slick themselves all to glittering like so, like their whole skin was nothing but mirror?
He saw me, and smiled, and said, Well met, Felicity Camden. And now we shall walk together, and next I knew I had been taken up with a great whirring of wings. I set to shrieking then, I don't mind telling you, for what good it did, for it seemed as though the cords had been plucked from my throat and all I could manage was the faintest of sighs even as I strained to be heard midst the swirling air that carried me up.
And up and up and up we rose, for what seemed like days (and for all I know it was), by which time I'd acquired a thirst most dreadful, temptation that was added to by the clawing in my belly. I kept my eyes squinched shut, and prayed for piety in the face of this enticement to sin, though really there was no way to yield to my baser nature lest I began to gobble my own self up, as no other sustenance presented itself. I squinched and squinched, and prayed and prayed, and at present began to forget that I was flying, and that the air around me was beaten by vast wings.
Until, with a great gust of silence that was more a bother to my ears than the noise had been, the world around me ceased to stir with whirling motions, and my already bothersome stomach lurched with the sudden stop my body crashed into. I gasped for breath, my chest filling with air so expansive it might have been food for my crying gullet, which rumbled at this sinful notion; and opened my eyes, so tight from squinching that it took a good few moments to pry the lids separate.
I looked around, gaze falling on the shapes that lay around me, and all the fright I hadn't felt on first seeing my devilish wrangler leapt up my backbone to my hindbrain all at once, as if a worm had tunneled there.
I'm in hell, I said to the devil, and fainted dead away.
From The Blasted Years: A History of the Church of He Who Walks Between the Rows
How does a church carry on through conditions of the most abject misery? Not persecution, which can be viewed as the glorious burden of those who suffer for their savior, or disaster, which is all too easily heralded as a sign that deliverance is nigh, but consistent, relentless, mundane hopelessness that strangles every ethos it lays hands on?
Quite simple, really: turn misery into a virtue.
It is still disputed by conservative religious scholars that the Gospel of Bartholomew is as much a part of the biblical canon as the four gospels that preceded it, but the overwhelming majority of textual critics maintain that it was written in the early years of the blight; manuscripts appear nowhere prior to that time, and quotations in theological treatises are nonexistent. Regardless of when it was written, however, the gospel was written, and it became the defining influence on an epoch of believers until the Fattening Time.
Where earlier depictions of the Messiah are multifaceted, full of parables, miracles, and sermons, the Gospel of Bartholomew is doggedly singleminded in its relation of the words of Jesus. The entire book is apparently a single long discourse from the Messiah to his disciples, a discourse whose themes are stoicism and asceticism in the face of meager resources. Where earlier versions of the Messiah would relieve the burdens of others by providing them with miraculous nourishmentthe transformation of water to wine at Cana, the feeding of the 4,000 and the 5,000, etc.Bartholomew's Jesus warns against enabling others in the sin of gluttony, depending on food and drink for sustenance instead of the divine. A typical passage reads: Eat no more than is required to live, in order that you might exist to praise your heavenly father; and if even this cannot be attained, rejoice! Your death shall take you where you need eat no more (Bart. 2:15). The gospel's author, seemingly drawing upon the apostle Paul's conviction that to live is Christ, to die is gain (Phil. 1:21), anoints hunger a virtue and starvation a blessed release.
In times of plenty, such a document would have been roundly lampooned as an obvious forgery and its message dismissed as extremist lunacy. But after the blight, when anything was needed to drag humankind from day to day, it became a rallying cry.
From 2 Song of Songs
My love is as the sun at midday,
Round and full and radiant with light;
My love is as a river in flood season,
Swollen and without end.
Her belly gives life, and absorbs it in turn;
Her appetite is boundless as the heavens.
Divine Abundance: A Patchwork of the Plague Years
by Faber
(The following is not to be remotely considered orthodox theology. Then again, the best Bible stories never are.)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?' And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.' But the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
Genesis 3:1-6a
And he said to them, Let no man exceed what is granted him for sustenance, and let no feasts and revelry exist in your land; for man does not live by bread, but by the word of God.
Bartholomew 12:7
Son, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.
David Wong, John Dies at the End
From Narrative of Felicity Camden; Being the Tale of a Girl Who Accompanied the Devil to Other Realms, Dallied with the Heresies of Abundance, and Returned with Not an Inconsiderable Amount of Self-Knowledge
I, Felicity Camden, daughter of the Church of He Who Walks Between the Rows, was met by Old Scratch, Goodman-Brown-like, on the evening of my eighteenth birthday, and snatched up quick as you please before I'd time for so much as a single prayer for deliverance.
I knew who he was without one bit of puzzlement, the instant I laid eyes on him. A queer matter-o'-fact sensation it was, without the sort of shiver up your spine most folk would expect from such a diabolical rendezvous. I turned my head, and my gaze slid across him like a finger through oil, and the thought popped into my head, Oh, it's the devil, walking by just there, with his shiny self all smart and polished. It was the shine more than anything that led me to knowing, right there and then; for what emissary of the godhead would flaunt themselves in so shameless a manner, and what human would find the water to slick themselves all to glittering like so, like their whole skin was nothing but mirror?
He saw me, and smiled, and said, Well met, Felicity Camden. And now we shall walk together, and next I knew I had been taken up with a great whirring of wings. I set to shrieking then, I don't mind telling you, for what good it did, for it seemed as though the cords had been plucked from my throat and all I could manage was the faintest of sighs even as I strained to be heard midst the swirling air that carried me up.
And up and up and up we rose, for what seemed like days (and for all I know it was), by which time I'd acquired a thirst most dreadful, temptation that was added to by the clawing in my belly. I kept my eyes squinched shut, and prayed for piety in the face of this enticement to sin, though really there was no way to yield to my baser nature lest I began to gobble my own self up, as no other sustenance presented itself. I squinched and squinched, and prayed and prayed, and at present began to forget that I was flying, and that the air around me was beaten by vast wings.
Until, with a great gust of silence that was more a bother to my ears than the noise had been, the world around me ceased to stir with whirling motions, and my already bothersome stomach lurched with the sudden stop my body crashed into. I gasped for breath, my chest filling with air so expansive it might have been food for my crying gullet, which rumbled at this sinful notion; and opened my eyes, so tight from squinching that it took a good few moments to pry the lids separate.
I looked around, gaze falling on the shapes that lay around me, and all the fright I hadn't felt on first seeing my devilish wrangler leapt up my backbone to my hindbrain all at once, as if a worm had tunneled there.
I'm in hell, I said to the devil, and fainted dead away.
From The Blasted Years: A History of the Church of He Who Walks Between the Rows
How does a church carry on through conditions of the most abject misery? Not persecution, which can be viewed as the glorious burden of those who suffer for their savior, or disaster, which is all too easily heralded as a sign that deliverance is nigh, but consistent, relentless, mundane hopelessness that strangles every ethos it lays hands on?
Quite simple, really: turn misery into a virtue.
It is still disputed by conservative religious scholars that the Gospel of Bartholomew is as much a part of the biblical canon as the four gospels that preceded it, but the overwhelming majority of textual critics maintain that it was written in the early years of the blight; manuscripts appear nowhere prior to that time, and quotations in theological treatises are nonexistent. Regardless of when it was written, however, the gospel was written, and it became the defining influence on an epoch of believers until the Fattening Time.
Where earlier depictions of the Messiah are multifaceted, full of parables, miracles, and sermons, the Gospel of Bartholomew is doggedly singleminded in its relation of the words of Jesus. The entire book is apparently a single long discourse from the Messiah to his disciples, a discourse whose themes are stoicism and asceticism in the face of meager resources. Where earlier versions of the Messiah would relieve the burdens of others by providing them with miraculous nourishmentthe transformation of water to wine at Cana, the feeding of the 4,000 and the 5,000, etc.Bartholomew's Jesus warns against enabling others in the sin of gluttony, depending on food and drink for sustenance instead of the divine. A typical passage reads: Eat no more than is required to live, in order that you might exist to praise your heavenly father; and if even this cannot be attained, rejoice! Your death shall take you where you need eat no more (Bart. 2:15). The gospel's author, seemingly drawing upon the apostle Paul's conviction that to live is Christ, to die is gain (Phil. 1:21), anoints hunger a virtue and starvation a blessed release.
In times of plenty, such a document would have been roundly lampooned as an obvious forgery and its message dismissed as extremist lunacy. But after the blight, when anything was needed to drag humankind from day to day, it became a rallying cry.
From 2 Song of Songs
My love is as the sun at midday,
Round and full and radiant with light;
My love is as a river in flood season,
Swollen and without end.
Her belly gives life, and absorbs it in turn;
Her appetite is boundless as the heavens.
